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News/Event Item
IAS Demands Canadian Prime Minister Harper and Other G8 Leaders Meet Their Commitments on AIDS Funding
Nov. 19, 2009
As its 6th Annual Governing Council Retreat drew to a close today in Vancouver, British Columbia, the International AIDS Society (IAS) called on Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and leaders of the other Group of Eight (G8) nations to fulfill their 2005 commitment to fully fund efforts to achieve universal access to HIV prevention, treatment, care and support by 2010.
Leadership from Prime Minister Harper is particularly important as Canada will convene and help set the agenda for the June 2010 G8 Summit in Muskoka, Ontario, which will also bring together the G20. While significant progress has been made in recent years towards scaling up HIV prevention and treatment efforts internationally, Canada and most of the other G8 nations have fallen notably short on the commitment they made at the 2005 G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, to make these services universally available by 2010. The year 2010 will be critical to financing the scale-up required to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a series of funding targets related to improving human health and development by 2015, agreed by all UN Member States.
“Prime Minister Harper recently promised to be a leader at the 2010 G8 summit, noting that the failure of Western politicians to fulfil their promises undercuts the credibility of their process. We couldn’t agree more,” said IAS President Dr. Julio Montaner, Director of the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS. “But loss of credibility is not the most significant cost of the G8’s failure to live up to its commitments on universal access. The real cost of these failures is borne by the estimated 7,400 people who become newly infected with HIV each day and the nearly 5,500 who die each day from AIDS-related illness. Prime Minister Harper has a real opportunity to show much-needed leadership on AIDS.”
© 2009 International AIDS Society
For full article, visit:
http://www.iasociety.org/Default.aspx?pageId=384
category: News from Other Sources : AIDS News
contributed by Liza Nanni on 20 November 2009
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